The phone hacking scandal exposed the failures of traditional institutions to maintain boundaries, distinctions and thresholds against the spectrallike entity of contemporary corporate media. - Sam Jacob in Domus on "The Architecture of Corporate Media"

N+1 editor Keith Gessen was arrested yesterday morning during the protest. The Awl lists other reporters who have been arrested during Occupy Wall Street.

Agata Pyzik writes about Ostalgia in Frieze, brilliant from start to finish: "Just as Žižek has already published 30-odd books, in which he calls for a reevaluation of the idea of Communism, one might well ask: is this an infinite project, serving only the perpetual Ostalgie business? How many times is the same ‘Idea of Communism’ (the title of a book by Tariq Ali) being sold to us?"

Social Media in the Age of Enlightenment (Open Culture.) "Europeans living in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had to deal with their own version of information overload. Emerging postal systems, the proliferation of short letters..and the birth of newspapers and pamphlets all pumped unprecedented amounts of information — valuable information, gossip, chatter and the rest — through newly-emerging social networks, which eventually played a critical role in the French Revolution" ...

Leigh Alexander writes about Ian Bogost's Facebook satire Cow Clicker that unintentially gained an audience not in on the joke (It was supposed to be silly, insultingly simple, a vacuous waste of time, and a manipulative joke at the expense of its players-–in other words, everything Bogost thought that Facebook games like the Zynga-made hit). The article also discusses his series of "game poems" A Slow Year.

The Paris Review considers the "high art fanzine" with one exceptional example. In 1997, Johanna Fateman was the twenty-two year old author of the fanzine Artaud-Mania. (the syphilitic and schizophrenic Artaud, an enfant terrible of French arts and letters, was an unlikely idol for the feminist punk scene that Fateman had been a part of and was reacting against—post–Riot Grrrl publications that rarely ventured beyond subjects like the DIY music scene, grassroots organizing, and personal politics. Her appreciation for Artaud came through artists and writers like Nancy Spero and Kathy Acker. Like them, she was inspired by his fierce articulation of what Spero once termed a “sense of victimhood”; Fateman put it more bluntly when she wrote approvingly that Artaud was a “crazy bitch with male authority.”)

My son is on the autism spectrum and has a severe receptive and expressive language delay. He’s four years old, and can read and spell words, and sing entire songs, but is more like an 18-month or two-year-old in normal conversation. He cannot use a telephone and has a hard time sitting still for video telephony. He has a thoroughly well-loved iPod Touch, filled with videos and apps that have helped him learn to speak and augment his ability to communicate... I bought my first iPhone when I broke my arm, because it let me use a computer with one hand. [When] I saw Apple’s demo video for Siri, its new voice-command AI assistant — which ends with a blind woman using Siri to send and receive text messages — knowing that blindness has been the disability least well-served by the touchscreen revolution — I wept. - Tim Carmody

[What] I find jarring about this formulation is the same thing that bothers me about the alarming trend of weddings in which the photographers and videographers have free reign, even during the ceremony, in order to get the best, most cinematic record of the event, at the expense of the event itself and everyone participating. It’s a conflation of the record of the event with the event itself, or even a privileging of the record over what gives the record its meaning and power - Joe Moon on Facebook Timeline and Google's Dear Sophie video.

"The frontier is always the border of something, virgin territory where we can build new worlds, remake ourselves; always there’s this obsession with remaking ourselves. So to dream of the frontier is also to desire immortality. But there is no such thing as new territory. There are always previous civilizations, societies, families, and cultures. So when we build new worlds, there will be violence." - Cathy Park Hong in the Paris Review

Ron Hanson (editor of White Fungus) interviews Taiwan artist Yao Jui-chung for Afterall. In 2010 Yao sparked a national debate with The Mosquito Project, a series of photographs and book documenting a multitude of idle public facilities scattered across Taiwan. Built purely ...

Rachel Lord writes about the history of khaki for DIS magazine, "khaki was a Victorian military breakthrough. A technology, first and foremost, that gave the “Informal Empire” of Great Britain her second wind... When confronted with the realities of non-conventional, guerilla-style warfare in harsh climates against an ever-changing enemy, their primary issue was their inflexibility."

"Instagram is all about death. The 70s filters our parents used, artifacts of cameras we’ve never held. Nostalgia is the negation of death, it proves we are still living even without an identifiable future. Instagram is a machine for producing instant nostalgia, a ward against death...We are told that digital (over)sharing on social networks and the like is a natural human impulse, that we’re merely augmenting extant human needs, the need to communicate, to form social groups. But what if sharing is actually a mourning for what we have lost? Or, that which our lives are now too full to contain."- James Bridle

Geoff Dyer's first column for the NYT on recursive summarizing in an academic book, not unlike "watching a rolling news program: Coming up on CNN . . . A look ahead to what’s coming up on CNN."

The fact is that if I've learned one thing in two years of studying how we think about the future, it's that the one thing that's sorely lacking in the public imagination is positive ideas about where we should be going. We seem to do everything about our future except try to design ...

This morning I was reading an article about Bjork’s upcoming Biophilia project and it starts by saying that her whole career “has been a quest for the ultimate fusion of the organic and the electronic.” I relate to Bjork on this, and the juxtapositions in Antlers Wifi can be seen as part of a similar quest/search. - Rick Silva interviewed in Beautiful Decay

Lost languages as teen cyphertools (Futurismic) We’ve talked about social steganography before; for teenagers and other folk restricted to communicating in public and/or monitored virtual spaces, a shared coded language becomes a necessity for the communication of ideas which you don’t want the watchers (be they parents, governments or whatever else) to be able to parse..... [Now kids are] reviving nigh-extinct local languages as a way of carving out their own cultural spaces. Example: southern Chilean hip hop videos posted on YouTube in Huilliche, a language on the brink of extinction.

"We once believed we were auteurs but we weren't. We had no idea, really. Film is over. It's sad nobody is really exploring it. But what to do? And anyway, with mobile phones and everything, everyone is now an auteur." - Jean-Luc Godard (The Guardian) See all of Film Socialisme compressed to a two minute clip and released by the filmmaker on Youtube.

Last Year at Marienbad is 50. awarded the Golden Lion at the 1961 Venice Film Festival and nominated for an Oscar, but also branded an 'aimless disaster' by Pauline Kael; lauded by some as a great leap forward in the battle against linear storytelling and a worthy successor to Hoffmann, Proust, and Borges (Mubi Notebook)

On archaeology and the "philosophy of recording"Why do we choose to record the sites, monuments and artefacts that we do? Why do we select the units of information we choose to record about them? How have the things we record and the attributes recorded changed over time?

Japanese secret B-2 Stealth Bomber 1988 From Wikipedia (redacted):“From 1989 to 2004, the South Dakota Air and Space Museum located on the grounds of Ellsworth Air Force Base displayed the 10-short-ton ”Honda-Stealth”, a 60% scale mock-up of a stealthy bomber which had been built by Honda in 1988 for an advertising campaign.
Although not an actual replica of a B-2, the mock-up was close enough to the B-2’s design to arouse suspicion that Honda had intercepted classified, top secret information, as the B-2 project was still officially classified in 1988. Honda donated the model to the museum in 1989, on condition that the model be destroyed if it was ever replaced with a different example. In 2005, when the museum received a B-1 Lancer for display (Ellsworth being a ...

Can we grasp this sense of ourselves as existing in time, part of the beautiful continuum of life? Can we become inspired by the prospect of contributing to the future? Can we shame ourselves into thinking that we really do owe those who follow us some sort of consideration, just as the people of the nineteenth century shamed themselves out of slavery? Can we extend our empathy to the lives beyond ours? - Brian Eno writing about the 10,000 Year Clock, in the essay from which The Long Now Foundation got its name. The clock is now under construction.

Tokyo-based, Senegal born, Kuwaiti artist Monira Al Qadiri's video Visual Violence, part of the bi-annual Aboveground Animation show, works off of the curt dialog and banal negativism (complete with the lethal injections and inner demons) that are common to a certain style of Japanese comics [with the] insertion of Qadiri’s own, more concentrated aesthetic, which often references Kuwaiti culture and traditions - V magazine. Interview with Al Qadiri.Vimeo page

Findr: Jacob Gaboury and Todd Shalom are using Grindr as a psychogeography research tool over Gay Pride Weekend. Interview on the project. It's not that we're rehabilitating a potentially problematic technology, it's that we are using the technology to find new ways to interact and create a shared, networked physical space. We're hoping to create new forms of contact between anonymous strangers, and in so doing create new ways of navigating the city.

Oscar Grant’s photograph of transit police officer Johannes Mehserle is rare: a portrait of the photographer’s killer. Unlike the recent photograph that a politician captured in the Philippines, Grant’s photograph, taken moments before Mehserle shot him in the back, was intentional. (It's Never Summer). See also: Radley Balko’s “The War on Cameras,” explaining misguided laws on "wiretapping" that make audio and visual recording of police officers illegal

Internet in a suitcase prototype for dissidents abroad. Suitcase will rely on a version of "mesh network" technology, which can connect devices like cellphones or computers, creating a web without a centralized hub. Thus, each innocuous-looking suitcase acts as a mini-tower that can bypass the official network. (The Atlantic)